It is something of a mixed blessing that our National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, is a man of few words. He does not speak often in public. He has been spotted eating biryani in the open in Shopian in Kashmir, but he rarely speaks in public, which is the downside of the blessing. It deprives us of useful information that only a person in his position is privy to. When he speaks, and those who have known him for long testify to this, his words sound as though they were part of some stream of consciousness, an undercover operator imparting undercover information. Sometimes the semantics is a little garbled, the import uncertain when the words have emerged as a hoarse Chinese whisper before they are passed on with due amplification. Even acclaimed practitioners of the genre, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf or that American, William Faulkner, would have to deploy a grammar squad to chase after the verbs, both transitive and intransitive, the objects, the modifiers, and the complements to glean their true meaning. But the end result is pucca worth it, not like those oracular translations you glimpse from time to time, processed by some smooth stenographer working in the media of a particular variety. He only seems to have gotten better with time.
Ajit Doval spotted eating biryani in the open in Shopian in Kashmir in 2019 |
Last week, he spoke at IIT Madras, that shrine of best scientific practices, with the Director, V Kamakoti, in the audience. Dr Kamakoti is a very valued scientist who recently told us about peptides present in cow urine and its anti-fungal, anti-infective and antibacterial properties, a scientific revelation that potentially catapults him to the same league of Nobel Prize contenders such as Donald Trump. True, his detractors have nastily pointed to similar amounts of peptidal (is that even a word?) properties present in the urine of other mammals, such as the humble donkey, but we will not let it detain us here, except to ringingly endorse a huge governmental grant to frontier research in this holy scientific field at IIT Madras. The mention is merely for the venue of the event at which the National Security Adviser said well into his opening remarks, “I never make public appearances. As Dr Goenka just told me before I entered here, he said, ‘This is the first time I am seeing you anywhere on a public platform in the last seven years.’ I don’t know when was it… that is the last seven years, but normally I never go.”
Having established the importance of the occasion, it is time to trundle out the information bomb, equivalent to the Fat Boy or Little Man, take your pick, unleashed on the audience.
This is verbatim:
“We decided to have nine terrorist targets in the criss-cross of Pakistan.”
“It was not on the border area or something, which we thought were their defeat. We missed none. We hit nowhere else except that.”
“And it was also not our defeat. It was precise to the point where we know who is where.”
“…Thereafter a lot of things I said is that this thing, foreign press and all these things, they said Pakistan did that. You tell me one photograph, one image in, you know, these days, these imageries are from the satellites all over the world.”
“They are this thing which shows any Indian damage being done, even a glass pane having been torn. I don’t know, only our forces would be knowing what’s happening in this area. But I’m just telling, they brought out photographs, they wrote this thing, the New York Times, put it this thing, put out images.”
The thunderous applause heard in these parts of the viral video is no doubt a glowing testimony to the acuity of the speechwriter (i.e., if the remarks were not extempore) and the perspicaciousness of the hallowed audience, being of sufficient intellectual calibre for their quick minds to dart to each and every nook and cranny and interstice and grasp the complete import of what was being revealed. It’s indeed a great pity that soon we will be losing the bulk of the graduating class to the lure of the filthy lucre from faraway shores, from whence they will applaud Operation Son of Sindoor, giving little non-fatal knocks to the assiduously built idea of Atmanirbhar Bharat on the way out. But this reporter digresses.
Torn glass windows. Yes, you read/heard that right. The concept trespasses lightly into the field of quantum physics, the tantalising knowledge of which the NSA displayed elsewhere in his speech and is probably a whole subject at IIT, Madras. Certainly there were no reports of glass windows being torn during Pakistan’s weak, pathetic and completely underwhelming, not to mention inconsequential, riposte to Operation Sindoor. It is somewhat confusing, though. The IIT speech is being interpreted in many quarters to mean that there were no casualties whatsoever on our side during Operation Sindoor, an interpretation that could be seen as a curious mixture of sycophancy and national aggression of the same variety that explained our aeroplanes using cloud and rain cover to evade enemy radar to hit really dangerous Jaish-e-Mohammed targets in Balakot, Pakistan. It means that the shelling and firing from across the border in such sectors as Poonch, Rajouri or even drone strikes and the resultant damage that we heard of were mere phantasms of traitorous imagination. It means that no aircraft, not even one, was lost in Op Sindoor.
Last week, this reporter had explained how every time a high-ranking security person connected with Op Sindoor spoke in public, it only gave us cause for more worry. Thankfully, it is time to discount the Chief of Defence Staff’s claim that some aircraft were lost. The revelations made at IIT Madras come as a sobering relief, especially after State Department’s Tammy Bruce’s assertion that the American opinion of how the hostilities between India and Pakistan ended trumps any locally prevalent opinion in India, no matter who holds that opinion. With the Pakistanis not being able to inflict even a single tear at any glass window this side of the border, they clearly didn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell. The Pak nomination of Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize was a bit of a fraud, after all. Let’s stick with the Israeli one.
V Sudarshan is the editor of FPJ. |
.jpg)
